Owen
Why are cars better than boats (to extend your vehicle metaphor)? Is it
the promise of flying cars, amphibious cars, submarine cars, etc. etc. ?
Perhaps the truth lies in what the user (public) is prepared to buy into
(literally) and price performance. We are suckers for hype. Then
there is the painless payment models that Apple has tapped into and
perhaps the painless app development environment so anyone can make an
'app'.
Tom has a point about 'horses for courses' (tho' he didn't use the
phrase). Web latency kills some application ideas. Insufficient
computing power kills others. The browser computing overhead can get
in the way. But browsers, desk(lap)tops, smart phones, tvs, bicycles
still have a place. Standards will continue to be discussed. Computing
power continues to increase. Developers will load up software (including
browsers) to take advantage of increasing hardware power. Gadgets are
great. The sun will rise in the east. Technical convergence is fine
until someone finds a business opportunity in divergence.
Aren't creativity, innovation, cost externalization, proprietary
technologies, free enterprise great?
Mind you, I think Apple has a real long term problem with developers'
needs to create once and deliver on multiple platforms. Meanwhile,
Apple makes hay while the sun shines, so this too will change.
The world is made of two kinds of people:
* Those who like to make it complicated and those who then try to
make it easy. Urban environments are complicated, apps let you
navigate them.
* Those who want to digitize everything and those who want to make
it analog. Capturing the world digitally in cameras, sound
recorders, film, smart phones, etc, then play it back in a way
that makes it seem continuous.
* Those who think the world is made of two kinds of people and those
who see a richness in culture beyond measure.
I'm not sure why you sound so surprised. May be you aren't. The quick
answer is "they are not" (it's really a loaded question)!
Thanks
Robert C
On 5/31/10 9:48 PM, Owen Densmore wrote:
I think an interesting question is "why are apps better than
web-apps?". In other words, we were all on the bus that felt the
browser was the new OS, and that web-apps were the new replacement for
"old fashioned" desktop apps. But now we find we were wrong, folks
preferred apps after all.
Why? What is the evolution we're seeing? After all, wasn't last
month's discussion about Flash vs HTML/CSS/JavaScript standards?
Where in heck did these puny little apps (not web-apps) come from?
Is the browser not the OS of the future? Are apps back? Have we lost
platform-independence?
What's going on?! :)
-- Owen
On May 31, 2010, at 5:42 PM, Saul Caganoff wrote:
The paragraph before your quote is pretty interesting too.
Interesting tension between developers who want to monetize their
apps and consumers who want everything free. Perhaps the App Store
model is a good compromise where $2.99 is close enough to free to
suit everyone.
Apple prefers the app model for two big reasons. First, it makes
their products stickier, since you’re not just buying an iPad, you’re
buying Apple’s whole system for delivering stuff onto the iPad.
Second, it seems that people are willing to pay for apps while they
are unwilling to pay for anything through a browser. So people will
pay $1.99 for an app that plays some game when you can already play
the same game for free on a web site somewhere. Maybe people think of
apps as standalone objects that have some value and that they can
buy, while they see web sites just as destinations that they go to
and that should be free. But as long as people will pay for apps,
that means that Apple can make money by selling them to you — and by
preventing developers from selling them to you directly.
Sent from my iPhone
On 01/06/2010, at 5:59 AM, Russ Abbott <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
From:
http://baselinescenario.com/2010/05/30/personal-computing-apple-google-2/
- Sent using Google Toolbar
Apple wants to be the new Microsoft. It wants you to buy
applications that run locally on your computer iPad, and it sees its
competitive advantage as having the most developers and the most
applications (hence all those “there’s an app for that” ads). As
Microsoft showed, if you can get a lead and become the developers’
platform of choice, you can benefit from network effects. ...
In April, Apple changed the terms
<http://daringfireball.net/2010/04/iphone_agreement_bans_flash_compiler>
of the iPhone developer agreement to prevent developers from using
cross-compilers to create iPhone apps. A cross-compiler is a tool
that allows you to take an application you wrote for one platform,
push a button, and repackage the application for another platform
(in this case, iPhone OS). The immediate target of this was Adobe,
which was developing a tool that would enable developers to take
Flash apps, push a button, and make them into iPhone apps. This
simplest explanation for this is that Apple, as the market leader,
wants to make it/ harder/ for people to develop for multiple
platforms at the same time. “Write once, run anywhere” — the slogan
of Java, but also the essence of developing for the web — is /bad/
for Apple, and they want to make it as hard as possible. (John
Gruber
<http://daringfireball.net/2010/04/why_apple_changed_section_331>
makes a different argument that Apple wants control over their
platform and doesn’t want cross-compilers between it and the
developers, but that interpretation is not inconsistent with mine.)
In other words, if you’re number one, then openness just helps the
competition, because if developers have to choose just one platform,
they’re going to choose yours.
So Apple is competitive; we knew that already. And they don’t want
to repeat the mistakes of the 1980s and 1990s; we knew that already,
too. But I think the important point is that they are promoting a
model of personal computing where most of the developers write for
the iPhone OS, and if you want to use their applications you have to
buy an Apple hardware product.
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============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
============================================================
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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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